Mutt handles a multitude of charsets and encodings with ease. If your
console has windows-1251 support, add the following lines to your
.muttrc:

charset-hook "windows-1251" "cp1251" set charset="windows-1251"

Mutt automatically converts all incoming messages for the screen
output. It can also convert outgoing messages basing itself on a
versatile pattern matching mechanism, e.g. the following line in
.muttrc will force mutt to convert all messages sent to
be-locale@iatp.unibel.by to koi8-r.